Beaches—East York, ON — 2008 Federal Election Results Map

Beaches—East York

The 2008 campaign in Beaches—East York was a rematch of the last one. Toronto's east-end riding runs from the Lake Ontario shoreline north across the Danforth into the former borough of East York, bounded by Coxwell Avenue on the west, Victoria Park Avenue on the east, and the Don Valley and Sunrise Avenue at the top. It joins two communities with strong and separate identities under one federal seat.

Candidates

Maria Minna (Liberal) — Minna was born at Pofi, in Italy, on 14 March 1948 and came to Canada at nine, her family settling near Christie Pits. She finished vocational high school, worked as a secretary and then earned an honours degree in sociology at the University of Toronto. From 1981 to 1992 she was volunteer president of COSTI, the immigrant services agency, while also heading the National Congress of Italian-Canadians; she co-chaired an Ontario Workers' Compensation Board task force on vocational rehabilitation in 1986 and chaired a second on service delivery in 1991. She entered Parliament in 1993 in the predecessor riding of Beaches—Woodbine, was parliamentary secretary for citizenship and immigration from 1996 to 1998, and served as Minister for International Cooperation from 1999 to 2002. By 2008 she was the opposition critic for the status of women.

Marilyn Churley (NDP) — Born at Old Perlican, Newfoundland, on 7 May 1948 and raised at Happy Valley–Goose Bay, where her father worked at the air base, Churley moved to Riverdale in 1978 and unseated a long-serving alderman to win a Toronto council seat in 1988. She was elected to the Ontario legislature in 1990 for Riverdale, was appointed Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations in March 1991 and held the portfolio until the Rae government's defeat in 1995, and later sat for Toronto—Danforth. She was deputy speaker from 1997 to 1998, became Ontario NDP deputy leader in 2001, and spent years pressing bills to open sealed adoption records. She resigned her provincial seat in 2005 and ran here federally in 2006.

Caroline Alleslev (Conservative) — A management consultant living at Oak Ridges, Alleslev carried the Conservative banner in a seat that had returned Liberal and New Democrat members for decades.

Zoran Markovski (Green Party) — An information technology consultant, Markovski ran for the Greens.

Roger Carter, a retired Toronto resident, stood for the Marxist-Leninist Party for the third election running.

About the Riding

South of Queen Street East, the Beach is one of Toronto's most recognisable neighbourhoods: a boardwalk, sand, Woodbine and Kew beaches, and a retail strip of independent shops and restaurants that behaves more like a small-town main street than a big-city corridor. The R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant at the eastern end of Queen, an Art Deco landmark still supplying much of the city's drinking water, marks the boundary with Scarborough.

North of the Danforth the riding shifts into Old East York, a former borough absorbed into the amalgamated City of Toronto in 1998. Its streets are lined with post-war bungalows and semis built for working families, and pockets such as Woodbine Heights, Topham Park and the Crescent Town apartment towers near Victoria Park house a growing immigrant population. Toronto East General Hospital stands just across Coxwell Avenue, outside the riding's western edge but the nearest hospital to most of it.

Small business and services dominate the local economy, with Queen Street East and the Danforth as the two commercial spines. Main Street station and the adjacent Danforth GO stop connect the riding to both the subway and the Lakeshore East line, and a good share of residents work downtown.

Housing costs and rental supply were the concerns raised most often in 2008, along with transit funding, water quality and beach closures on the lakefront, and the pressure chain retail put on the independent shops that give the Beach and the Danforth their commercial character. Crime and gun violence, a persistent Toronto issue through the preceding years, also featured in the campaign.